Context > grammar. You have the most powerful context analyzer in the known universe sitting between your ears, use it. Complain about ambiguities, or untruths, not grammar. You are noise in the signal.

I would have put the apostrophe key on a 35 foot extension, since most people seem unable to grasp that it's means it is.

Slashdot is a forum without integrated spelling or grammar checking. Cut and Paste doesn't work reliably: "it's" becomes "itâ(TM)s." For even more fun, try posting a timely response to a Slashdot story from a tablet or smartphone.

There were no tablet based software keyboards then, so the @ symbol was as accessible as 2 - just use the shift key.

Only thing I wish he had done - make the thing case SENSITIVE. Like Foo@Bar.com would have been different from foo@bar.com or FOO@BAR.COM.

About his colleague telling him that that was not something they were supposed to be working on, reminds me of the original UNIX creators who were trying to build a platform where they could play 'Space Travel'.

Had that been the solution, you could have had JohnSmith@acme.net, johnsmith@acme.net, JOHNSMITH@acme.net and any number of other combinations to support the various John Smiths out there in the world and using the same service, such as gmail or icloud or outlook.com

If you mean he decided to make email addresses case insensitive, then you're wrong. The interpretation of the local part is up to the receiving end. "User@example.com" and "user@example.com" are different email addresses and mails to these addresses may end up in different mailboxes. In practice this is rarely the case, but the standard does not allow the sending MUA or intermediate MTAs to make any assumptions about the interpretation of the local part by the destination MTA.

Microsoft Exchange being a bunch of dickheads that promote case sensitive usernames on email. Fucking retards.

This is a fine example of "making shit up". Good job Anonymous Coward.

To be clear, with Exchange you can set SMTP addresses to use mixed case for readability purposes (JohnSmith@mydomain.com) but it has zero impact on accepting mail; that mailbox will accept jOHNsMITH@mydomain.com as well.

The part after the @ is a domain name. According to RFC 1035, domain names are case insensitive. Technically however, the local part of the address (the part before the @) is case sensitive, or rather can be case sensitive. It would be wrong to send mail to user@domain.example when you were given the address User@domain.example. In practice the local part is almost always case-insensitive too.

*sigh* you obviously missed my point: while "@" is pronounced "at", its meaning is roughly the same as that of "in". Why would you use "@" for a superficial wordplay when you have this wonderful chance to use its meaning to replace an entire element of the list ["requiescat", "in", "pace"], while keeping the other elements intact.

Gary Thuerk [computerworld.com] sent the first spam email [wikipedia.org] in 1978. It was an ad promoting DEC computers in ALL CAPS. In 2004, when he was asked if he feels guilty for sending the first spam, he said: "I never feel guilty. Someone would have done it..." He is on LinkedIn and offers this: "You can have the Father of E-spam be a speaker at your company function. You can watch people line up at your technology conference booth to meet the Father of eMarketing."

Other people who worked hard on killing the usefulness of the internet

Thanks for all your work on this new tech. I've found it especially useful and it has given me great joy at times.

One of the best times is when I emailed the school staff list "from the District Superintendent", clarifying the dress code for staff on "Casual Fridays".

I started with a few stolen lines from a real memo. I included some choice text from the district's student dress code for maximum troll effect and ended with a school colors clown nose requirement.

I actually got to hear one of the office staff say: "I didn't know the district had a casual Friday!". Everyone laughed, and I did not go to jail. The district IT staff got the message and updated their SMTP server to use authentication.

All I can say is that being a pre-internet email sysadmin in the era that transitioned between <machine1!machine2!user> with some atrocities of decnet mail addressing thrown in and sent over modems with uucp/uumail, the appearance of <user@machine2.domain> email addresses really helped to make sendmail.config parsing files totally insane with both left to right and right to left name resolution and routing rules that persisted until we could afford to get directly attached directly to the intern

Ayyadurai started working on his "EMAIL" program in 1979, one year after the first spam email had been sent to several hundred recipients on the ARPANET. Congratulations to him on being alive, but he is not the inventor of email.